A dicey prison factoid is born

Even though this country comprises just 5 percent of the world’s population, we incarcerate almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.

I wondered, if this factoid, which was repeated in newspapers and cable television repeatedly, is factual. So I did some checking around and the answer is: Not really.

The statistic comes from a report from the International Centre on Prison Studies. I emailed the group to ask if The Centre agreed with the statement that the U.S. comprises just 5 percent of the world’s population, but incarcerates almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners. I had doubts because, as Politifact reported, the official list leaves out some 650,000 held in Chinese detention facilities. And:

The World Prison Population List includes totalitarian regimes and nations often on the world’s bad actors list such as Iran, Libya, Syria and Venezuela. But it does not include two Communist countries: Cuba and North Korea. So how many inmates do those countries have?

Amnesty International gave us a report it released in May 2011 on political prisoner camps in North Korea. It concluded there were an estimated 200,000 people being held in such camps, using satellite images and eyewitness accounts. That equates to 813 per 100,000, higher than the U.S.

Roy Walmsley, Director, ICPS World Prison Brief, sent me this answer:

I think it would be safer to say that the U.S. comprises less than 5% of the world’s population but incarcerates more than 20% of the world’s prisoners.

The numbers we show are official figures. Some are published on the web by the prison administration, the Ministry responsible for the prisons or the national statistical office. Some we obtain directly from the authorities in the countries concerned. Their reliability cannot be confirmed but for most countries the reliability is never questioned. But note the fact that the China figures are incomplete (see the China page on the World Prison Brief), no reliable figures are available for North Korea and figures for Somalia are also incomplete. Note also the fact that a few countries hold some pre-trial detainees in police facilities whose totals may not be included in the prison population totals.

In the 9th edition of my World Prison Population List (2011) I reported that more than 10.1 million prisoners were held in penal institutions throughout the world, including pre-trial/remand prisoners. A 10th edition of the List is scheduled for publication by the International Centre for Prison Studies later this year. There are indications that if the Chinese published figures for pre-trial detention and administrative detention and if there are, as has been suggested, some 150,000-200,000 prisoners in North Korea this would lift the total to around 11 million.

But I am more skeptical of the ICPS data than Walmsley who, by the way, essentially corrected Holder. As Michael Rushford of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation noted, some of the listed countries (start with China) do not conduct the most thorough reporting. “That is a completely unverifiable number … In places like China, parts of Africa and the Middle East and even South America, nobody knows how many people are in prison or how many are just taken out and shot.”

Maybe you think I’m quibbling. But given that the ICPS cannot really count every prisoner. Since when are we supposed to just accept tinpot nations’ prisoner estimates. And what the ICPS can compute for the U.S. percentage isn’t “almost a quarter,” but “more than 20 percent.” It’s instructive that Holder apparently did not question the statistic, and then have his staff rewrite that part of the speech, or leave that line out altogether. Because the above sentence will be regurgitated, exaggerated and set in stone — and have a tremendous effect on how Washington writes policy.